The Big Secret (about the Massachusetts Election, and Everything Else)

My good friend Will Collier is giddy about Scott "This is My Truck" Brown's win in Massachusetts, and with good reason. A Republican takeover of Ted Kennedy's seat is no small feat.

No doubt Will and others will analyze the election to death. Many will argue that it's a refutation of Obama and liberalism. Of course, it was only a year ago that Obama's victory was supposedly a refutation of Bush and conservatism. And four years before that Karl Rove was rubbing his big fat belly and contemplating a "permanent Republican majority." So either there's a lot of refutation going on, and everything's speeding up, and the refutations are going to become weekly, and then daily, until everything starts spinning around and around really fast until we disappear into a black hole, or something else is going on.

I think I know what that something is. It ain't a big secret. The Big Secret of politics is that there's no secret. The better candidate usually wins--especially in an open seat.


I'm not saying the better guy (or woman) wins. I'm not saying the better Congressman, or senator, or president wins. I'm saying the better candidate wins.

These days candidates just don't get swept into power on waves of ideology. The spinmeisters will tell you different, but that's their job, and they want to remain employed. You can make the case for 1980, but I'd say there hasn't been a true ideological shift in this country since LBJ and Tricky Dick got the guns-and-Whitey-God crowd in the south to switch parties back in the sixties. Since then, the politics have been mostly for show as members of both parties rant and rave and then, once in office, dutifully obey their corporate overlords.

So how do you be a better candidate? Usually, you have to be reasonably good looking. Bemoan this all you want, cite LBJ and that Traficant guy, but if all other things are equal, comeliness is the tiebreaker (unless you're even stupider than you are good looking--more on this later). Second, you have to stay on message. Your message must be simple, and you must repeat it over and over, no matter how dumb. Third, come up with some kind of cornpone, man-of-the-people prop, but don't overdo it. Brown had it right with his truck. If he'd gone overboard and walked around in a ridiculous plaid shirt like Lamar Alexander, he would have lost. Fourth, you must have good organization--good fundraising, good GOTV effort. When someone calls and says she wants a sign in her yard, you take her the fucking sign.

Lastly, it really really helps if the other candidate is an idiot and fails on one or more of the above. Coakley was an idiot. Not particularly well-liked to begin with; a friend of mine who grew up in Boston said he didn't know much about her, but never liked her much. But then she topped it off with the Curt Schilling thing. I'm from Alabama, not Massachusetts, but I know if you were running for office down there and said Joe Namath went to Tennessee, or Bo Jackson went to Georgia, you'd be toast. It takes a really special kind of idiot to lose Ted Kennedy's seat, and she, along with her state and national party cohorts, qualified in spades.

Still don't believe me about just being the better candidate? Let's review. My political memory goes back only to Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was the better candidate. Sure, plenty of people derided him, were terrified of him. But he was a movie star, and Mr. Carter was, well, a dullard. Whatever else you might think about him, good or bad, you can't say he was Mr. Excitement. The better candidate won.

Though neither option in 1988 was much to write home about, Bush 41 was the better candidate. Dukakis never really found his voice, and he should have never gotten in that tank. Bush had the "read my lips" lie, the Willie Horton ad, and he hung out in flag factories for most of the campaign.

In 1992, Bush looked at his watch. Clinton played the saxophone and Fleetwood Mac. Looking back on it now, his philandering probably helped at least as much as hurt by providing a bit of color. Gennifer Flowers wasn't exactly Marilyn Monroe, but she wasn't Monica Lewinsky, which would have been a killer.

In 1996 Dole was the "Get outta my yard" candidate, a theme the Republicans would revisit in 2008.

The soon-to-be Bush 43 was the better candidate in 2000. Maybe Gore was smarter, maybe he would have governed reasonably well as a robotic technocrat, but while he was busy changing wardrobes, Bush was repeating "compassionate conservative" and "I'm a uniter, not a divider" over and over. Was it true? No, it was horseshit. But he campaigned better, and (more or less) won.

Now 2004 was a real race to the bottom. We thought the Democrats couldn't lose that one even if they tried, but they tried, and they succeeded! They nominated John Kerry, who almost won anyway, but ended up windsurfing his way back to the Senate.

In 2008, Obama had it all over Grampy. Despite what some others may say, I don't think Americans are so enamored of the Black Man that they're champing at the bit to vote for him, even if he's light-skinned and doesn't speak in a Negro dialect. Obama had the looks, the message, and the organization.

The better candidate usually wins.

Now I should stress that none of the above is intended to refute the fact that the Democratic Party is the stupidest fucking party on the planet. Their only saving grace is that the Republican Party is the second stupidest. They're both stupider than even your lower mammals; a squirrel can figure out how to jump through any number of hoops to raid a bird feeder, and then repeat the process over and over and over, but for the parties, every election is new.

So you can expect the Democrats to learn just a bit from this January election to temper the damage in November, and then they'll forget it all. The Republicans will inevitably grab the reins of power again, and some Newt Gingrich guy will get drunk with power, divorce his wife for his chief of staff, and the cycle will begin anew.

And as usual, we'll be the losers.